The Classic Hollywood Inspiration For Matcluck, Futurama's Alien Chicken Lawyer
This post contains spoilers for "Futurama" season 11 episode 8.
On top of its hilarious main ensemble, "Futurama" is home to a stable of eccentric recurring characters, ones who could only exist in a science-fiction comedy like this. One of my favorites is Matcluck, better known as the Hyper-Chicken. Matcluck (voiced by Maurice LaMarche) is a human-sized, blue-feathered bird and the Planet Express crew's go-to attorney.
The Hyper-Chicken's most recent appearance was the latest "Futurama" episode, "Zapp Gets Canceled." After the eponymous starship captain is court-martialed, Matcluck both defends and prosecutes him (on behalf of plaintiff Kif Kroker). The lawyer eventually declares his own client guilty, and he's thereby sentenced to both rounds of sensitivity training and to wear a Scarlet C (for "canceled"). This pseudo-win is more of a victory than many other cases the Hyper-Chicken has tried in the past (in the season 3 episode "The Birdbot of Ice-Catraz," he himself was in jail for legal incompetence).
How did the "Futurama" writers come up with such an absurd character? Despite being from a "backwoods asteroid," the Hyper-Chicken speaks like an American Southerner. A talking chicken with a southern accent — is the Hyper-Chicken a descendant of Foghorn Leghorn? His name (revealed in a deleted scene from the film "Into The Wild Green Yonder") also evokes television lawyer Ben Matlock (Andy Griffith).
However, the roots of both Matlock and Matcluck stretch back to Paul Biegler (James Stewart), the protagonist of Otto Preminger's 1959 courtroom drama, "Anatomy of a Murder."
Anatomy of a Lawyer
In "Anatomy of a Murder," Biegler is a stand-in for then-Michigan Supreme Court Justice John D. Voelker. On top of his legal career, Voelker was an author; he wrote the literary source material of "Anatomy of a Murder" under the pen name Robert Traver. Like Voelker, Biegler is a lawyer in rural Upper Penisula Michigan. The events of the film, based on a 1952 case of Voelker's, sees Biegler defend a soldier who killed his wife's (apparent) rapist. Biegler has Stewart's trademark drawl, but despite his protestations of being "a humble country lawyer," he's far from a good ol' boy rube.
Biegler is a former district attorney and he repeatedly shows that losing re-election didn't dull his appetite for playing politics. Throughout the trial, he grandstands, provokes the "big city" prosecutor Claude Dancer (George C. Scott), and asks questions/hurls insinuations he knows are inappropriate since, while they can be stricken from the record, they can't leave the Jury's collective memory. Viewers who watch "Anatomy of a Murder" decades later and expect to see Stewart as another moral underdog (a la "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington") will be surprised to find Biegler is just another underhanded lawyer.
Biegler V. Matcluck
The Hyper-Chicken's first appearance (season 2's "Brannigan Begin Again") sees him paraphrasing Biegler: "I'm just a simple Hyper-Chicken from a backwoods asteroid." This isn't the only time he's rolled out such a description ("I may be a simple country Hyper-Chicken, but I know when we're finger-licked!"). Even so, the humor comes not just from the reference, but the dissonance in hearing "simple" and "Hyper-Chicken" back to back.
While Matcluck has the attire of a country lawyer (see his bowtie and old-fashioned chain pocket watch), his skills pale in comparison to Biegler's. One of his cases has some overlap with "Anatomy of a Murder," though. In the film, Biegler's defense rests on his client being not guilty by reason of temporary insanity — after some difficulty, this plea wins the day. In the season 3 episode "Insane in the Mainframe," Matcluck defends Fry and Bender from a bank robbing charge. After failing to prove they were set up, he switches to an insanity defense. His proof that his clients aren't in the right minds? "Well for one, they done hired me to represent them."
"Futurama" is streaming on Hulu — new episodes are released every Monday.